Only the Good Eat Well

The current fashion for using the Bible as a dieting and health guide is a great idea. It restores the Bible to its rightful role as the apex of spiritual and physical integration. Belief in G-d is meant to bring about salutary physical benefits as well as spiritual, as science is beginning to find out. Studies show that those who believe G-d controls the world are less likely to be plagued by doubt, worry and anxiety. Prayer has also been shown to be good for the soul and good for the body.

Kosher laws serve a much deeper purpose than keeping us healthy, however. They keep us human.

The good may sleep better at night, but, as Woody Allen remarked, "the wicked seem to enjoy their waking hours much more." Bad things, it is true, are more enjoyable than good things. Gossiping is more fun than remaining mum, having many sexual partners is more fun than monogamy, and spending money on clothes beats giving it to charity. Violence is a rush. No thrill is as great as allowing the beast within to roam free, irrespective of the destruction it wreaks.

As the architect of man, G-d saw it necessary for man to incorporate an animal nature. Without our animal nature, our lusts, passions and instincts, the ancient rabbis said, no man would ever marry a woman or build a home. Still, we need to harness our animal natures, ensuring that our passions are always channelled into G-dly , as opposed to selfish, directions.

What is needed, therefore, is a code of conduct to purge man of his natural instinct for violence and to condition him to receive as great a thrill from altruistic action as he does from inflicting injury on others. Society has devised its own safety nets: sports allow the populace to cheer for their team to destroy its foe. Some social anthropologists even suggest that the violence featured on television and in films, far from being harmful, allows society to rid itself of its primal instinct for violence.

Long ago, in the wilderness of Sinai, Judaism devised a program to wean man from his appetite for violence. This system is called Kashrus, the highly misrepresented and misunderstood Jewish dietary laws. Keeping kosher has been dismissed as legislated hygiene. We hear of how eating pork can lead to trichinosis and how shellfish were prohibited because of the dangerous bacteria they contain. But while there are definite benefits to eating kosher food - because of the high standards of kosher meat, for instance, none has ever been found infected by Mad Cow Disease - these are all merely collateral benefits.

The laws of kashrus mandate that a Jew can only consume those animals which chew their cud and have split hooves. Only fish with fins and scales may be consumed. The Torah designates 24 types of birds, all birds of prey, as not kosher. In addition, the Jew is prohibited from eating blood, and may only consume the flesh of an animal which has been slaughtered from the neck.

These laws teach Jews to abhor the sight of blood, to detest death, and recoil from unnecessarily hurting any of G-d's creatures. The love of sadistic pleasures must be utterly uprooted from the Jewish heart. G-d is the Creator of life, and man is its guardian and protector.

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